Abstract
This chapter discusses how our understanding of twenty-first-century skills and competencies has changed amidst ongoing waves of digitalization in the modern workplace. Specifically, it takes a deeper look at what it means to be an expert in a digital age and the implications this has on (workplace) learning and training. Extant literature on the development of expertise and skills tends to take a linear approach: becoming a skillful practitioner is a matter of gradual and progressive development along the different phases from novice to master. This chapter, on the contrary, argues that this linear model is not adequate to capture the complexities of what it means to be an expert in a digital era. Because digital transformation occurs at an increasingly faster pace, there is not one interpretation of what constitutes expertise in a given timeframe and profession. In other words, expertise has increasingly become distributed amongst professionals in different fields and different generations, as well as between professionals and technologies. This chapter focuses on this distribution of expertise and proposes a reconceptualization of the term that goes beyond expertise as stepwise domain upskilling to include a more holistic understanding of expertise as multifaceted mastery. This reconceptualization captures how expertise is becoming distributed in ever more complex ways across people and technologies. It also opens up ways to reconsider learning and development as not occurring via a neatly organized line of progressing from novice to expert but as a lifelong process affected by several feedback loops. The above are substantiated mainly by empirical work conducted within Singapore’s manufacturing sector.
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Poon, K.W., Willems, T., Liu, W.S.Y. (2023). The Future of Expertise: From Stepwise Domain Upskilling to Multifaceted Mastery. In: Lee, W.O., Brown, P., Goodwin, A.L., Green, A. (eds) International Handbook on Education Development in Asia-Pacific. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2327-1_42-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2327-1_42-1
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